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Reading the works of Charles Bukowski is a male, and by extension, masculine activity, and as such it can make a female reader feel as if she is trespassing into some male preserve. Arguably, in entering many organisations, women experience similar feelings. The purpose of this paper is to offer an account of the process of reading Charles Bukowski's novel Post Office as a woman.

In order to evoke her response to the text of Post Office and to reclaim her feminine identity in the face of Bukowski's masculinist project, the author adopts a multilayered, art‐based methodological approach using Bukowski's text as well as her own, Bukowski's biographer's, texts of a number of theorists of research methodology, visual illustrations and notes.

Through the original use of arts‐based methodology, the paper offers insights into the embodied, situated experience of reading Post Office, and gives an account of the author's reflections on organisational sexism, brutality and escape in the novel.

Drawing the attention to the multilayered interweavings of novel, author, organisation, analyst and discipline, the paper moves us beyond a representational reading of Post Office to consider the materiality of the text within the productive assemblage of organisational theory.

The purpose of this paper is to explore conceptions of radical change and utopianism in the work of Philip K. Dick and Fredrick Jameson in order to challenge the neo‐liberal orthodoxy that historical change is no longer possible. The paper relates this orthodoxy to the dominance of the realist novel as a literary genre and contrasts this with the fantastic and delirious world found in Dick's science fiction.

Jameson's dialectical criticism is combined with aspects of a Benjaminian montage to explore the relationships between ideology, material social organization and the forms of specific literary genres. This approach simultaneously denaturalises the present and opens up the future to the possibility of radical change without delimiting that future by prescribing its form. In this respect the paper is concerned with utopianism rather than representations of Utopia.

The paper shows how the realist novel functioned within a conservative social ideology to prevent change. In contrast works of fantasy like Dick's science fiction open up new possibilities for change and a future that is not entirely delimited by the present but, by denaturing the present, opens it up to a virtual indeterminacy that is the space of freedom.

Theoretically, the paper extends conceptions of radical social and organizational change by considering the limits of dominant conceptions of change and of radical conceptions that seek to represent Utopia. Methodologically the paper contributes to readings of novels in organization studies by introducing Jameson's dialectical criticism and through a critique of the dominant preoccupation in the discipline with realist novels.

Seeing, one might say, is everything between black blindness and white blindness: between not seeing because of the absence of light and not seeing because of the blinding quality of light; between seeing nothing and “seeing” only that which produces vision (usually the sun or God). Within organizational literature, organizations have often been linked to black blindness. The purpose of this paper is to explore the idea of organizations as places of white blindness.

This paper finds its inspiration in Saramago's novel Blindness but it does not offer an analysis or interpretation of the novel. It seeks an understanding of contemporary organizational phenomena by freely drawing upon some of Saramago's literary achievements.

Black blindness, e.g. the absence of vision through an extreme division of labour, is an important phenomenon in organizations but white blindness is getting more prevalent. Three causes of white blindness are identified and briefly discussed: the brilliant leader, the brilliant product and the brilliant employee.

The paper contributes to the literature on vision in and outside of organizations and crosses boundaries between a variety of disciplines, most notably leadership studies, consumer behaviour, Human Resource Management, philosophy and theology.

This volume explores an expansive array of organizational imaginaries, or understandings of organizational possibilities, with a focus on how collectivist-democratic organizations offer alternatives to conventional for-profit managerial enterprises. These include worker and consumer cooperatives and other enterprises that, to varying degrees, (1) emphasize social values over profit; (2) are owned not by shareholders but by workers, consumers, or other stakeholders; (3) employ democratic forms of managing their operations; and (4) have social ties to the organization based on moral and emotional commitments. The contributors to this volume examine how these enterprises generate solidarity among members, network with other organizations and communities, contend with market pressures, and enhance their larger organizational ecosystems. In this introductory paper, the authors put forward an inclusive organizational typology whose continuums account for four key sources of variation – values, ownership, management, and social relations – and argue that enterprises fall between these two poles of the collectivist-democratic organization and the for-profit managerial enterprise. Drawing from this volume’s empirical studies, the authors situate these market actors within fields of competition and contestation shaped not just by state action and legal frameworks, but also by the presence or absence of social movements, labor unions, and meta-organizations. This typology challenges conventional conceptualizations of for-profit managerial enterprises as ideals or norms, reconnects past models of organizing among marginalized communities with contemporary and future possibilities, and offers activists and entrepreneurs a sense of the wide range of possibilities for building enterprises that differ from dominant models.

Policy actors around the world are increasingly looking to the social economy – markets explicitly oriented towards meeting social needs, usually through the third sector – to underpin livelihoods and deliver welfare services. Once considered an adjunct to markets and states, and possibly even a residual, the social economy is being seen as a legitimate player in the plural economy, able to thrive through the effort of dedicated individuals and organisations committed to ethical entrepreneurship. The assumption is that future capitalism can accommodate, perhaps even requires as recession deepens, the energies of the social economy in making new markets and meeting welfare needs. While a body of research has emerged examining the economic characteristics of social enterprises and how they succeed or not in managing the interface between market and ethical priorities, little is known about what it is like to be involved in the social economy or about what different social actors gain from the experience. However, most academic and policy thinking assumes that engagement in the social economy is both rewarding and empowering. This paper aims to fill this gap.

This paper draws on sobering case evidence from Bristol relating to the experience of social entrepreneurs, employees and volunteers.

The critical question raised by this study is whether the role of the social economy should be that of returning the socially disadvantaged back into the formal economy. The evidence in this study tends to suggest that this expectation could be misguided and overly ambitious.

The paper offers insight into the backgrounds, motivations, experiences and futures of people involved in the social economy.

Man has been seeking an ideal existence for a very long time. In this existence, justice, love, and peace are no longer words, but actual experiences. How ever, with the American preemptive invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq and the subsequent prisoner abuse, such an existence seems to be farther and farther away from reality. The purpose of this work is to stop this dangerous trend by promoting justice, love, and peace through a change of the paradigm that is inconsistent with justice, love, and peace. The strong paradigm that created the strong nation like the U.S. and the strong man like George W. Bush have been the culprit, rather than the contributor, of the above three universal ideals. Thus, rather than justice, love, and peace, the strong paradigm resulted in in justice, hatred, and violence. In order to remove these three and related evils, what the world needs in the beginning of the third millenium is the weak paradigm. Through the acceptance of the latter paradigm, the golden mean or middle paradigm can be formulated, which is a synergy of the weak and the strong paradigm. In order to understand properly the meaning of these paradigms, however, some digression appears necessary.